Author Archive
Wanna Bet?
I’ve just begun to explore my next travelog topic (admittedly a little late - sorry about that) but I think it has the potential to be really interesting, at least to me, a relative internet simpleton and non-gambler. I’m going to take a close look at     InTrade.com a gambling site unlike any other I’ve heard of. I was originally going to look into online gambling as a nod to March Madness, but on intrade, you don’t bet on sports, or stocks, or fantasy leagues, or celebrity tabloid appearances (fafarazzi.com) - you bet on politics: election outcomes, who will win the democratic nomination, whether the US will go into a recession, when troops will be pulled out of Iraq, whether the next Pres will meet with North Korea…you get the idea.
 Though I’ve become more attuned and opinionated with this election, I’m generally not much for politics. I’m definitely no gambler; the only thing I bet on is an annual football pool, and that’s just on winner and spread of each game. I’ve been to a casino once and I have little desire to go back. It’s just not my thing. The point is that it should be interesting for a novice politico and non-gambler to embed myself in InTrade…I haven’t checked yet, but I hope the buy-ins are low!
Steal This Film & the Future of GoogTube
In the documentary Steal This Film, a variety of talking heads, mostly web 2.0 site founders and (new) media scholars, discuss the significance of file-sharing and its supposed threat to the established media industries.
WE’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE
The film begins by explaining that historically there new technologies have always provoked strong resistance from the dominant industries that stand to be undermined. When the printing press was developed and the everyman became able to produce and disseminate his thoughts, the monarchies and churches of Europe railed against it as the work of the devil because it took away their ability to control knowledge and information, and therefore, their power. Fast forward to the 1970s, when network television stations rallied against cable because they thought it too was piracy, along with the VCR.
YOU CAN’T STOP THE BEAT
So the current conflict over p2p technology is harldy new, but it has elicited an unprecedented reaction from the establishment, which is seeking criminal rather than civil recourse for piracy. But can they really shut down file sharing by suing a few big guns like Napster and Kazaa and going after individual users? The one speaker the doc features from the MPAA admits that they will “never” be able to stop p2p, but they hope to slow it down and find a way to return control to the producers of the material being shared online.
The doc goes on to explain that there are 2 primary reasons that p2p is unstoppable. First, with the development of network computers in the late 50s-early 60s, computers became decentralized. The internet is simply a global expansion of this decentralized network whose function is contingent on the reproduction of data, such that it’s impossible to simply go and shut down one central computer. You’d essentially have to go and cut every single wire. As one commentator put it, “in fighting file sharing, the entertainment industry is fighting the fundamental structure of the internet.” Second, sharing is a fundamental human urge. We are social beings who seek to create and partake in communities.
Who Owns the Net?
Well, I’ve taken a bit of a road trip on this assignment and ended up quite a distance from where I began with a whole new host of questions I hadn’t thought about before (so I guess the assignment was effective).
 Traveling from inter-linguistic communication online and the promise of an auto-translating Google Browser to censorship across the globe, the first thing I’ve been reminded of is just how easily the personal becomes political. I began wondering how families and friends communicated across different languages in countries where the internet is completely (or nearly completely) accessible. I’m concluding wondering about how these same families and friends comminicate within countries that censor internet access altogether. If you can’t access 85% of emails, it doesn’t matter whether you’re next door to your family or miles away. If you can’t access Google, how much more difficult would it be to know what was going on in your own country, let alone across the globe. In some ways, you might as well be living in a room with no windows - or at least that’s how I imagine it would feel to live with the net in your grasp but inaccessible.
Right to Left to….Nowhere? Digital Third Worlds
I started my travelog exploring the possibilities for auto-translation online and in general for inter-linguistic communication, but the further I dug, I began to realize that there’s a much bigger issue at stake here than just how we communicate with friends and family. As I dug deeper, my travelog took a detour and I wound up researching the populations without access to the internet at all, and how that affects their role in the world. In 2001, 87% of global internet sites were in English. As you might expect, the distribution of internet activity is heavily skewed toward the Western world:
       
So where’s everybody else?
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Disappearing Comments?
Is anyone else having trouble getting their comments to take? I’m logged in and keep writing comments and then clicking “submit” only nothing happens. The page refreshes and my comment disappears but isn’t posted…I haven’t had this problem before, so…help? please?
Can You Read Me Now?
Well, I’ve begun poking around online to see what I could find about inter-linguistic applications, and while I was surprised at how far the possibilities for translation have been taken, how few have been implemented.
 From what I can tell, Google is thus far a lot of talk and not much production. For example, Google Browser would be designed to automatically translate websites in foreign languages into the language you’ve specified as your own. The trick? It will happen behind the scenes, so that when you search for, say, Japanimation, you will get Japanese sites in English among your search finds. It’s really an amazing idea that I think will have a major impact on how we search the web, how we communicate online, and hopefully, how we view other parts of the world previously closed off from us due to langauge barriers. What would happen if Palestinians could read Hebrew sites and vice versa? Might it help change perceptions of the other?
 There are a few other Google innovations in store that are also promising (and to me, at least, mind blowing). GIM, or Google Instant Message, would automatically translate your chats into the language of the intended recipient, and vice versa. You could type in English and have your friend in Marseilles read it in French. True, VoIP apps such as Skype and Jajah have already significantly changed the way we talk to each other across borders, but the inability to utilize the net as fully inter-linguistically as we do at home is still a setback.
There is also the possibility of text-to-speech and speech-to-text translation, and taking it a step further, Google Translator, which would be a device you could speak into in language A and be “spoken” back in language B. These developments are lagging behind strictly text-based translation programs, but it’s incredible to imagine how we would communicate if we all had personal translators in our pockets.
All of this is pretty exciting, but there are of course some major hurdles to overcome. Google’s translation programs work by “reading” lengthy texts in two different languages and noting when a word or combination of words overlaps, so that based on repetitive findings of places where “happy hour”, for example, matches “5 a 7″ in French, it will conclude that these words mean the same thing. But language changes quickly, and spoken language changes far more rapidly than print. How would Google keep up with slang, new expressions? Another problem: how would Google deal with incorrect spelling, grammar, or syntaxe, especially in blogs?
A lot of these programs are in development but have yet to be fully launched. In the meantime, you can of course set your Google search and Gmail to a different language, and it will be partly translated. For example, I switched my Gmail setting to Hebrew, and all the names of correspondents and subjects were still in English, but all the usual tools were in Hebrew, and the setup swicthed to right-to-left, which was a bit trippy:
 
So far as I can tell in this preliminary research, the potential of text auto-translation is huge, so I’m still struggling to narrow down my environment. I’ve ruled out VoIP as far as a means of inter-linguistic communication because it’s already fairly well established (Intel and Deutsche Telekom’s venture capital divisions have just made major investments in Jajah).
I’ve asked my friends abroad to tell me about how translators and the net in general are used in their countries, and how they communicate with us. I’ll get back to you when I hear back from them…
Left to Right, Right to Left
The internet is a global phenomenon, yet we tend to conceptualize it as existing within North America alone.
This is only my first Traveler’s log, so I have not yet fully flushed out my environment. That said, I do know that I intend to focus on the issues surronding inter-linguistic communication online. What sorts of applications are there for non-Germanic languages? Has the internet age changed the way family and friends overseas communicate? To what extent has voice over IP or video chatting reduced the use of email in inter-linguistic communication? Are translation programs preferable to programs that use character based or right-to-left languages?
 Obviously I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I am really eager to delve into these topics, and will narrow it down once I map them out. I suspect it will be difficult to focus on just one of these aspects, since the issue of inter-linguistic communication is both personal and political (Why haven’t the major corporations produced the same applications in these languages? I imagine it cuts certain parts of the world off, such as the Middle East and Far East. Even if there are programs available for translation or email in these languages, they aren’t available for BlackBerrys and such, which limits communication to when you’re at you computer, which is practically the Stone Age.)
Wait - I don’t have a BlackBerry or iPhone or faux-iPhone. I still use my little ghetto cell phone, and I don’t even pay for web access on it. Gotta work on that, but I’m honestly afraid that once I go mobile my life will be forever altered and I’ll be even more attached to life online than I am already, which is apparently next to nothing compared to the rest of the class!
 Back on topic. So many questions, so little time! Some classmates have already mentioned JaJa, which I will definitely look into as I start exploring, but please feel free to point me toward anything you think might be useful. Thanks!
